At last the first retail K8 Socket is reviewed at OCW Labs. Inheriting the best of best from the successful GA-7NNXP, this board should not be unfamiliar to those who have own the 7NNXP. With a feast of features that includes Gigabit Ethernet + 10/100 ethernet (dual), Dual Power Sysytem K8 (DPS K8). Specially designed for Athlon^TM64 platform, the Dual Power System delivers a total of 6-phase power circuit to provide more solid and durable power supply for the new generation AMD platform. Ensuring a more secure and stable platform than ever before. There is also Dual BIOS to protect again bad flashes of the BIOS.

With the innovative function of Universal Audio Jack (UAJ) of ALC 658 AC97 codec, this platform provides superior 6-Channel stereo without the distress for wrong installation.  This platform is the first motherboard with IEEE1394b FireWire interface from Texas Instruments (TI). With the transfer speed up to 800Mb/s, the new generation IEEE1394b interface further enhances PC connectivity with consumer electronics audio/video (A/V) appliances, and storage peripherals.

This board also supports Serial ATA RAID and IDE RAID. The Silicon Serial ATA interface is furnished with RAID 0,1 function for extra performance enhancement and data protection. The on board GigaRAID IDE RAID Controller
Supporting RAID (0, 1, 0+1), JBOD function and ATA133 interface, GigaRAID Controller delivers completely solution for storage interface to increase fault tolerance, improve data access performance and provides additional interface for more IDE devices.

Performance of this board is pretty good especially when dealing with data crunching. As we can see from the benchmarks, the less IDE dependent benchmarks scores better. As the memory controller is built into the CPU, the overall system performance would most probably very dependent on the HTT and IDE performance. Although NF3 did not implement a full 16bits, the performance level can be compensated by the single chip design.

Installation is quite straightforward as the front panel connectors are all colour coded. The speakers/mic/line in also has the jack sensing feature making it easier for you as we won't need to bother which jack should which plug goes to. The documentation is quite clear in its descriptions of setting up RAID arrays.

Overclocking wise, we managed to pull it up to 218MHz FSB at CAS 2.5, 6-3-3. It is quite stable at that FSB. For max stability, we increase the DIMM voltage by +0.1v.

Suggested Retail : NA

Discuss & read more

Pros 好处:

• 6 Channel audio
• USB 2.0 
• Dual LAN Gigabit + 10/100Mbps Ethernet
• 1394
• SATA RAID, IDE RAID
• DPS

Cons 坏处:

• Clear CMOS Jumper has no pins for clearing cmos
• Chipset's heatsink might block some graphics cards
• No Async fsb:memory modes

Ratings

Here are my ratings out of 10 stars.